latest posts

May 10, 2015

Intro

Those following my blog for some time know my passion for Silicon Graphics machines. After having picked up a Silicon Graphics Onyx 2 last fall I
finally had some time to get the "big iron" up and running. The Onyx 2 is interesting in that it is the one of the last "board" based deskside graphics
machines. Following the Onyx2 the only comparable workstation would be the Tezro offering up to 4 R16000 1ghz CPUs and a 128mb V12 Odyssey graphics
card. My specific Onyx2 CPU wise was nearly maxed out with 4 400mhz R12000 MIPS cpus and completely maxed out in ram at 8gb. Graphics systems wise it
was pretty low end. It came with a DG5-2, GE14-2 and 1 RM8-16 Raster Manager, effectively making it a Reality graphics system.
Fortunately eBay in time had a DG5-8, GE16-4 and 2 RM10-256 boards for extremely cheap so after swapping the boards I now have an
InfiniteReality3 system. The InfiniteReality4 (the last generation) only differs by offering the RM11-1024 (1gb of texture
memory) versus the 256mb per board I have in the RM10s in addition to Pixel Fill Rate differences of nearly double.

Geometry Engine (GE) 14-2

Geometry Engine (GE) 16-4

Raster
Manager (RM) 8-16

Raster Manager (RM) 10-256

Like most of the machines I have gotten second hand they come with the original slower scsi drives. This Onyx2 came with the original 9gb IBM Ultra-Wide
SCSI 2 hard drive with IRIX 6.5.8 on it. Knowing from the listing the cd-rom drive was faulty, I simply copied all of the IRIX 6.5.30 cds over NFS to
upgrade it. After which like I had done with my Silicon Graphics Origin 300 back in 2012. For those inquiring I chose to my goto Ultra 320 SCSI Drive, the Maxtor Atlas 15K II.

A look at my Onyx 2 all wired up, note this was before I swapped in the DG5-8:

I should note anyone curious getting an Onyx2, you should keep it in a cool place or outside of a bedroom as the fans (which are temperature controlled)
when in full speed are quite loud.

Benchmarks

Knowing one of the first things I do after getting a new system up and running is benchmarking it with my own cross-platform CPU benchmark, jcBENCH. Wanting to compare the R12000 and R14000 architectures, specifically with my goto 4xR14000
600mhz Silicon Graphics Origin 300 I ran jcBENCH. Surprisingly with the extra 200mhz (50% increase) and enhancements the R14000 MIPS cpu
brought, my Origin 300 is over 3 times faster in both integer and floating point tests.

Since I had never had an InfiniteReality system before I wanted to test it with something semi-recent such as Quake 3. Knowing it was not optimized for
gaming, let alone optimized for IRIX I was still intrigued.

For my Quake 3 benchmarks I used the neko_quake3-1.36.tardist release
leaving everything on the highest settings except filtering which I left on bilinear. For each test in Quake 3 the only things I changed were the
resolution and bit depth. No other processes were running.

The results were pretty interesting. Being on just a step down from the highest end cpu I figured the performance might actually be better with the
InfiniteReality3 installed. If anyone reading this has an IR3 and 4xR14k Onyx2 please run the same tests and let me know your results. Overall the
biggest jump was swapping the RM8-16 with an RM10-256, especially when using 32bit bit depth. What I found most interesting is the addition of a 2nd
RM10-256 and swapping out the GE14-2 for a GE16-4 brought upon diminishing returns. This leads me to believe at that point Quake 3 became CPU
limited with my 400mhz R12000s. Knowing that this particular build is single threaded I am curious how my 600mhz R14k Fuel with a V10 would perform in comparison (a test I will do in the coming weeks).

Closing Thoughts

For a machine that if bought new in May 2001 would cost $252536 (per this pricing sheet), I feel as though I have a piece of history that for a time blew away what was delivered by the PC and Mac worlds. Based on my own research comparing systems with PCs of the time (and other workstation manufacturers like DEC and Sun), the Onyx2 was one of the last extremely competitive offerings Silicon Graphics had. One could argue the Octane 2 was the last. Companies like 3dfx (interestingly enough had several Silicon Graphics employees) and AMD drove the PC industry forward with their Voodoo and Athlon products respectively; the "death of the workstation" so to speak.

Feb 12, 2012

I figured after attempting to compile SDLQuake and running into x86 assembly, UDP and linking issues I decided to try the "official" IRIX port from SGI. Oddly enough, Quake II runs at 640x480x16 with full textures on my Silicon Graphics O2. Feeling adventurous, I wanted to see if it would play with the x86 Windows 3.20 version. Sure enough, I was able to play with an IRIX hosted game (it would probably work the other way as well) with my Windows 7 workstation.
[caption id="attachment_927" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Quake II on my O2"][/caption]
On a side note, I got SDLQuake to get all the way to the linking stage before giving up on it. For whatever reason using -lSDL was not including what looks like X11 or OpenAL libraries. I included both of those libraries and was still getting the errors.

Feb 11, 2012

Finally got Quake working on my Silicon Graphics O2. Using the "official" SGI port from September 1997, it runs fairly smooth at 1024x768x16.
[caption id="attachment_924" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Quake on my SGI O2"][/caption]
It did bring up old memories of my first LAN party in Summer of 1998 playing Quake, particularly E1M7 as seen in the picture. Definitely makes me want to have a Retrogaming LAN with Quake or Descent.